On Office noise: Are your homicidal thoughts about your noisy office-mate justified?, Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily writes about a study in which office workers performed basic clerical tasks in either a quiet room or while listening to a recording of typical office noise. The workers who heard the recording had higher epinephrine levels after three hours—a physiological indicator of stress—and also performed lower on cognitive tasks. The study suggests that having a quiet workspace may both improve productivity and lower stress. If you can’t control the decibel level in your office, wearing noise-canceling headphones or listening to white noise could also help.

Reader Matthew Platte offered his own suggestion:

Have y’all spent quality time in a cube farm? If I had to go back, my choice of ‘natural masking’ device would be a gas-powered leafblower, or perhaps a chainsaw.

Whatever it takes.

Over on the Technology channel, Benjamin Cohen of the World’s Fair posted an editorial cartoon in Are Nuclear Plants A Gun to Our Heads? which sparked a debate about the merits (or not) of nuclear energy. Though the cartoon was originally published in 1976, the issue still swarms with controversy; the potential for nuclear disaster is particularly frightening to some people, particularly when alternate energy sources exist.

Reader Jim Thomerson sums his feelings up neatly:

I’m trying to picture terrorists attacking a wind farm.

Some other Brain & Behavior posts we thought were cool this week were: